Being a Rockefeller, Becoming Myself by Eileen Rockefeller

Author:Eileen Rockefeller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

24.

MALE MENTORS

I think of poems and dreams as my underwater life and daily experience as my terrestrial. In this way I navigate learning with one eye submerged and one eye above. I have more control about what’s above water, but I am often more intrigued by what surfaces from the deep.

One dream, in my mid-twenties, has guided my life. Harold Hochschild, whom I met when I was a senior at Middlebury College, was central to this dream. He had written the definitive, two-volume history of the Adirondacks and my thesis would not be complete without meeting him. I made a phone call that was the start of a seven-year friendship lasting until his death at eighty-nine, in 1981.

Harold became one of my mentors. He loved people of all ages and I visited him twice a year for house parties at his rambling wooden Adirondack lodge, Eagle’s Nest. He would send his Piper Cub floatplane to pick me up in Vermont, where I was living and working, to spend the weekend with up to twenty other people.

We rode Tennessee walking horses in the morning, played tennis or hiked in the afternoon, and always joined him at exactly six fifteen each evening for a swim in the lake. He wore thin black bathing shoes, little white goggles, and a pair of tan, loose-fitted trunks. I watched as he slowly lowered his short, hunched body down the ladder at the end of the dock. A man in a mahogany-hulled Chris-Craft motorboat waited to accompany him and any others fit enough to follow, as he swam a quarter mile to the other shore, and back.

Harold was a good listener. He was also a generous philanthropist to many causes and an enduring friend. I was living in San Francisco when he died. He left me $15,000 in his will to do with what I wished. I had never before been given money from anyone other than my family. His bequest became the seed money for a research fund at the Institute for the Advancement of Health, which I founded, in 1983, to promote scientific understanding of mind/body relationships in health and disease. Out of Harold’s fund we gave the seminal grant to one of our scientific advisers, Dr. Dean Ornish, who has since become internationally known for his research and practice to reverse heart disease through diet, exercise, and social support. Harold was not only on my side, he was still by my side.

Harold’s ability to assert himself at strategic times in my life in loving and supportive ways was perhaps why he became the subject of an important dream.

A few years before his death, I dreamed I saw Harold lying on his bed in a large natural-wood room of his beloved Eagle’s Nest. He was on his back with his mouth open, dead. I knelt by his side to pay my last respects.

Next to him was a basket of turkey feathers. I was supposed to take one as an offering. I saw the feathers as a symbol of the gentle side of his personality and the mysterious winged journey ahead.

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